It's time to deal with students who cheat

HIGH-STAKES COLLEGE DREAMS: Parents push, students cheat, administrators turn a blind eye and high school teachers are punished if they crack down

Regan McMahon, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, March 30, 2008

Students who cheat. Chronicle graphic by John Blanchard

Students who cheat. Chronicle graphic by John Blanchard

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Students who cheat. Chronicle graphic by John Blanchard

Students who cheat. Chronicle graphic by John Blanchard

It's time to deal with students who cheat

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In late March and early April, anxious high school seniors wait for little white envelopes or big fat mailing packets indicating whether they gained admission to the college of their choice. They did everything they could to make the grade. And for 75 percent of them or more, according to a national study conducted by Duke University, that included some form of cheating.

Yet despite the prevalence of academic cheating - ranging from copying homework to plagiarizing off the Internet to purloining test answers - and the concern that without ethics you get Enron, there are no statewide or school-district wide academic integrity standards. Perhaps it's time to make curbing cheating part of the public policy agenda.

Among the consequences of letting it go unchecked is student and teacher alienation. As I reported in the Chronicle Magazine last September, many students, under intense pressure to get good grades for college admission, believe they're chumps if they don't cheat. And many teachers report that when they catch cheaters red-handed, the administration doesn't back them up.

We got an earful from teachers in middle school, high school and college after that article. One of those instructors, signing her e-mail "A math teacher from Marin," said she had sent two students - eighth-graders in a ninth-grade math class - to the vice principal for cheating and asked that they be warned rather than face serious punishment.

"One set of parents thanked me," she wrote. "The other set of parents harassed me by e-mail, complained to the principal, and I was consequently admonished by the principal. Not only had the student cheated (witnessed by two teachers and seven or eight students and admitted by the other student), but then she lied about it and lied about me, injuring my integrity in the school community.

"When I couldn't bring myself to then complete recommendation forms to four private high schools on her behalf, the principal told me that she would write the recommendations and I would have to sign them. Then the principal forced me to meet with the parents, where she shamed and humiliated me in front of the child, the parents and the vice principal. If the administrators lack integrity, how can anyone in the school community be expected to have it?"

Gerald Fisher, a consulting professor of physics at Stanford, told of a student whose practice was to take an exam, then bring it back for a regrade, claiming the graders had missed material she'd written. "She did this on each of the midterms," wrote Fisher. Then, after the final, when she predictably came back for a regrade, Fisher revealed that he had photocopied her original, which lacked the material that now appeared, and filed charges against her with the Office of Judicial Affairs. She was "let go scot free" and Fisher was disciplined for violating the university's honor code by copying her exam.

No punishment for students

When Kathy Cheer of Santa Cruz was a registrar at a small 7th- to 12th-grade private school, five seniors were found guilty of plagiarism, having copied history papers word for word off the Internet. "The teacher called for disciplinary action," she recalled, "and, to my surprise, the Judicial Review Committee agreed simply to reduce the students' grade in the course - an A student received a B. The act of plagiarism would not appear on their transcripts."

Kou Nelson, a teacher in Concord, wrote in that "there is something terribly wrong when a teacher shows a parent student work that is blatantly plagiarized and the parent refuses to believe it, regardless that the URL address is printed on the bottom of the student's work, links are highlighted, and the material has little to do with the assignment."

He says over the past 10 years, of the approximately 170 students he teaches a year, he's caught 25 percent cheating or plagiarizing. And he never made accusations without hard evidence, which, he notes, is time-consuming to gather. Then, after that, he must fill out a cheating report, "hold a private conference with the accused student, call the parents, potentially have additional conferences with the parent and student, inform administration and counselors, and possibly have even more conferences with parent, student and administrator. Is it any wonder that some teachers let cheating/plagiarism slide?"

Still, some Bay Area schools are tackling the cheating issue head on.

Matt Biggar, principal of Burlingame High, which has a student body of about 1,400, made "Making the Right Choice" the theme for this school year. For almost two years, he has worked with Denise Pope, who heads up Stanford's SOS - Stressed-Out Students - a research and intervention project that seeks to address problems associated with academic stress.

"A big part of the SOS program has been parent education, so we've been successful at working together," he said. "Last year we elaborated on our academic honesty policy and spelled out the consequences in our first-ever honor code, which includes a code of conduct as well as our academic honesty policy.

"For a first offense (of cheating), the student and family are brought in, and then a contract is drawn up for the student, and the student is sent to a counselor to get at the root of the problem. The message is given that this is very serious. If there's a second offense, the student is dropped from the course and given an F."

Biggar doesn't have the data yet, but said, "It feels as if second offenses are down quite a bit. Any effective campaign against cheating has both aspects: It's preventative and has strong consequences, which we hope serve as a deterrent."

He noted that kids get caught up in the frenzy over getting into one of a handful of elite colleges. "We tell them, 'Do your authentic work and you will end up in the college that is right for you.' "

Integrity statement

St. Francis High School, a Catholic school of 1,600 in Mountain View, is in its third year using the SOS program. Principal Patricia Tennant said that when she asked students what caused them stress, the answer came back loud and clear: the pressure to be successful, which led to an extensive discussion about cheating.

Together they developed a policy in which any student caught cheating is suspended for a day, and any assignment for that day gets a zero; the work cannot be made up. An integrity statement is created for each class, which the students write on every paper and test. And the teacher makes a statement vowing to uphold the policy. "So you had the buy-in from both sides," said Tennant.

She noticed a dramatic decrease in the incidence of cheating the first year, and then it leveled off last year and this year. "It's much more the awareness than the consequences that makes it effective," she said. "The big deal is that everyone in class is going to be playing by the same rules. It's a contract they have with each other."

With ample evidence showing that honor codes and academic integrity policies work, why don't school districts mandate them? Maybe it's because we parents have not insisted it be on the public policy agenda. In the post-Enron era, can we afford not to?